A village on a beacon height looked quaintly gay as we
passed through; the first lights were just coming out
blithely in houses that stuck on like swallows' nests under
the eaves of the church: then down a big dip and up again
on to the crown of the downs, the place of high spirits.
I looked back from the top and the sun was gone now,
leaving the north-western sky aglow with solemn bars of
russet flame; the nearer trees stood, flat as black lace laid
on a crimson dress, against that subsident pomp; ahead
the woods were darkening on the low ridges. The bloom
was on the hour; the visible world, that shifts and changes
and re-makes itself as ceaselessly as a blown flame, had
caught for a moment the fugitive poise of perfection that
seems almost passionate, making the senses ache with a
delight that is also a longing to transcend one's own com-
monness and to shape new, clearer thoughts. Luxuri-
ously I put off asking whither we were going. Enough
to be projected out into the summer night and the un-
known. The
The eager wheels licked up the road, the un-
familiar villages slid past, a voluminous river seemed to be
bearing me chartless, rudderless and anchorless, bound to
whatever might come and yet, in spirit, almost ecstatic-
ally free.

To sleep I give my powers away;
My will is bondsman to the dark;
I sit within a helmless bark.

What waking freedom is like that freedom of reverie? "Like them that dream "-the words were well chosen to figure the joy of Zion delivered from captivity. Somewhere far off in the gathering dark strange hands, perhaps,

were making a bed and cooking food; some unknown brain was easing me of man's besetting worry of finding the right thing to do and the right place to make for; a world that looked like an absolute master was really my servant -at every new turn it would take the labours of decision off my hands and bear for me all the distresses of perplexity. "I am the clay and thou art the potter"-what an exultant cry of emancipation it is! To take right shape, to serve fine ends, and all without struggle, or choice, but in trances of utter open-armed surrender to something you take, once for all, to be better than you.

"G.H.Q., sir! Montreal!" My driver broke in on my musings. We had just topped the crest of a ridge: he pointed across a deep valley in front, to a little hill heavily wooded and darkling now in the thickened dusk. Among the softer curves of foliage a few slightly harder lines of ancient fortification could just be made out. The car flewsilent down a long hill and crossed a marshy bottom to address itself to the steep winding road of access to a tiny walled city set upon that small wooded hill. In two minutes more a sentry had halted us under a massy brick arch that was built by Vauban.

Where Sterne had had

his papers checked, upon his Sentimental Journey, the English corporal of the guard looked carefully by lantern light at mine and then, falling back to attention, saluted and passed me on into the little dark streets where Chaucer had walked as an English envoy and Ney had commanded the left of Napoleon's army that was to cross over and subjugate England.

W

HAT sort of love could a mother expect from a son who had never yet got a good sight of her face, although he had seen, shall we say, the tips of a few of her nails, or perhaps a square inch of her skin? Of course he might well have heard many fine things about her. He might be proud of her fame and the stir that she had made in the world; grateful, too, for what she had done for himself. But this is not love.

An

As with your mother, so with your country. Englishman who has never seen England full face may certainly find much about her for gratitude, goodwill and pride to linger upon. At sight of all the red paint on a map of the world he may find an agreeable sense of property warming him. Truly a large and a handsome estate! Or, again, the mixture of Celtic, Teutonic and other serviceable elements in English blood may gratify his common sense. Or his mind, with its fine political instincts, may run complacently upon such topics as freedom slowly broadening down from precedent to precedent. Or he may be uplifted in heart on reflecting how many more millions of Mahometans he and his brethren control than even the regular Commander of the Faithful. And yet, strictly speaking, none of these pleasant emotions is love, either.

Tell me, where is fancy bred?IA
How begot, how nourished?

It is engendered in the eyes,
By gazing fed.

Love might well come in at the eyes of the first Romans of all. On the mound where the Capitol was to be, they could stand and survey the whole of the cramped village below and the crush in the tiny Forum. They saw, without having to turn their heads round, their whole motherland. And love may well have come easy for some early Venetian sailor homing across the Adriatic at night and espying through the dark the little groups of lights shining out from the wonderful camp that he and his comrades in trouble had pitched on the face of the sea. The sons of Monaco, again, when not busy filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away, may obtain ardent filial emotions to-day when they walk up to Turbia, look down and view at one glance the whole land of their birth basking and shining, compact in the sunshine below. But what is to happen when no single gaze can take in the whole of the object of which it is meet that we be enamoured?

No one, said Fox, could really be in love with Mrs. Siddons. Her scale, the huge structure of her genius, precluded any tender approach. In the court of love, as humanity knows it, her head would be sticking out through the roof. You might as well cherish a passion for Ursa Major or for the East India Company. And modern man, presented with an Empire or a continent

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for a mother, may seem like some good little fellow of middling intelligence given in wedlock to a Tragic Muse. “I have already," a troubled American said when the Philippines were delivered into his hands, " more country than I can love." In the writings of Mr. Kipling the most piercing cry of patriotic longing is no fine flourish about lordship over palm and pine, but the wail of the Cockney soldier in India for London, "the sounds of 'er and the sights of 'er" and the smell of the orangepeel, asphalte and gas. There is, as every one knows, a patriotism that calls out for size, always more size. "Das Vaterland muss grosser sein," a German patriotic chorus used to say, and a popular hymn to England said ditto:

Broader still, and broader

Shall thy bounds be set;
God, who made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet.

But the love which is wholly love clings instinctively to things that are within the reach of sense, and small enough to be held in one grasp. It cannot embrace abstract nouns nor the glories of conscious extensiveness. Indeed, it may suffer pangs of the haunting apprehension of mothers. Some day," they say to themselves, as they look at the child on their knees, “he will be too big to lie in my lap any more."

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II

From Leith Hill, in Surrey, the Shoreham gap in the South Downs allows you to see the shining waters